Best performance CPU for ~ £100 ??

[dan_aka_jack]

I've got about 100 UKP to spend on a CPU for a video editing workstation (yeah, I know the budget is tight for such a system). Am I right in thinking that my best bet is a s939 AMD Venice? Should I be considering Intel? As far as I can tell, AMD are kicking Intel's ass at the moment. And what about s939 Opteron?

Thanks,
Jack

 

[GAMEfreak]

opteron 146, or the more available 144 , although you would need to use dividers or overclocker memory to get the best out of them.

 

[dan_aka_jack]

Cool, thanks loads for your very quick reply.

Sorry, I should have mentioned: I'm not planning to overclock this machine very aggressively. I'm building it for a friend who doesn't have the time or the inclination to spend days tweaking it so it needs to "just work" once it's built... which means we can't overclock much. Stability is more important than sqeezing every last drop of performance out of it.

Do the opterons need much more cooling than Venices? I assume that 1MB of cache pumps out quite a lot of heat.

Thanks,
Jack

 

[Street]

You can get 3700 San Diegos now for around £120... might be worth looking at

 

[dan_aka_jack]

Wow! I didn't realise it was possible to get a San Diego for that little. How does a San Diego compare to a similarly priced Opteron? On paper there seems little to distinguish them.

 

[hogfather]

they're identical - opterons use san diego cores.


The only difference is the opterons are slightly better cores, as they have to be rock solid for servers. This results in them overclocking brilliantly. Get whichever you can find cheaper.

 

[Minstadave]

The 3700+s are clocking really nicely, just as good as the opterons at the moment from what I've seen, and they have a nice 11x multi.

 

[ken1307]

and Opteron is no longer in £100 price range

 

[dan_aka_jack]

Awesome, thanks!